Social Media

You’ve just logged into your favorite social site, and now it’s different. “Where did the button for X go?” “Hey, that doesn’t take me to Y any more!” “What happened to the Z feature?” The panic begins to rise. You start thinking back to whether you did anything different to cause this problem. “Did I click on something I wasn’t supposed to by accident?”

Relax! Social media sites change. Sometimes it’s a tiny thing, and sometimes it’s a big thing. Sometimes you get notification that a change is coming, and other times you don’t. That’s just how it is.

But take this moment to savor the opportunity.

“Opportunity?” you exclaim. “Everything’s messed up! I don’t know how to get my regular stuff done any more! I’m back to square one!”

Precisely! You are back to square one. But the opportunity is that so is everyone else.

A frequent refrain from the less tech-savvy folks I work with is that there’s so much to learn and that they fear they’ll never learn everything they have to in order to be effective. But when a social media site changes things, everyone goes back to square one. At least briefly.

Granted, those of us with a bit more experience will probably get up and running again a little faster than those starting from scratch the first time. However, it’s in these moments of equalizing and resetting that the newbie can make a bunch of progress relative to the “experts.” They are just as unaware of what the new thing does, or where that old feature went to.

Rather than sitting back and wanting to wait until the experts figure everything out, then, what you should be doing is leaning in because you are just as much an expert as anyone else right now. Figure something out yourself, then look for others who are asking about that thing. Answer their question.

Now who’s the expert?

You are.

(Note: This article was triggered by the Google+ redesign launch of mid-November 2015. However, the same dynamic came up in 2011, for example, when Facebook launched the “Timeline” or when Twitter made video content more prominent, or Pinterest changed both their terms of service and how pinning worked, and will continue to be the case in almost every social media site change for as long as there are social media sites.)

I’ve recently finished a 4-day boosted post on Facebook. It was about a class I’ve got coming up, and included an image because posts with images are more likely to be interacted with, and interaction with a post loosens the death-grip of Facebook’s filter. It had a link to more information about the class, which the text of the post lead up to. I put $20 into it–a rather inexpensive promotion, provided it gave decent results.

Here’s what I discovered once it was over.

The First Red Flag

The first thing I noticed, even while it was running, was where the “ad” was being run. It was shown 2,941 times to mobile users, and 27 times to desktop users. However, the trend from the start was that the desktop users were the ones most likely to interact. Of the 56 “engagements,” 11 were desktop users. That makes the “engagement rate” of desktop 40.7%, while mobile was 1.5%. And yet Facebook served the ad to the least likely audience 99.1% of the time.

No points to Facebook for effectiveness on that point.

Waitaminute … this is Seattle, right?

I had targeted the post to people with interest in business (specifically, “Business, Retail, Wholesale, Website, Communication”) within 10 miles of Seattle, to get some of the outlying communities who might still come to the class. That’s roughly going to correspond with King County, WA. The demographics of King County are roughly 71% white, 15% Asian, 9% Hispanic/Latino. About a quarter of King County residents speak a language other than English at home.

I’d expect that the interactions with my post would, very roughly, approximate that demographic…more than half white, for example, and mostly English speakers.

But what I got was very much not that.

I can only see the people who Liked (35 people), Commented (0), or Shared (0) the post. Of those, more than 1/3 had what appeared to be Hispanic/Latino family names, and only one had a name consistent with China, Taiwan, Japan, India, Vietnam, or Cambodia.

That got me thinking, so I looked at profiles, and about half of the people whose posts I could see posted predominantly in non-English languages, with Spanish being by far the most common. Very strange for King County and it’s 9% Latino population if my post is only being shown within 10 miles of Seattle.

So I did a little more digging and looked at where people lived. A third didn’t have any geographic information at all. Just over a quarter came from Seattle and neighboring communities I’d expect to see with the “+10 miles” modifier. And the rest came from other places. Like Ohio, and Florida, and New York. Puerto Rico. Suffice it to say that none of those places, while still United States, are not within 10 miles of Seattle.

Nor are the people from France. Tonga. Ecuador. Mexico. El Salvador.

Well, at least the overabundance of Spanish started making sense. But either lots of people were lying about where they lived, or Facebook was doing a terrible job of actually delivering the audience I was paying for.

Or, I suppose, since they said that 100% of the impressions were US based, maybe the French, Tongan, Ecuadoran, Mexican, and Salvadoran people who saw my post were coincidentally all part of a tour group that was visiting Seattle while my boosted post ran, which they saw on their mobile devices. But I don’t think that’s too probable.

And you’re how old?

While I was looking up where people lived, I noticed another strange pattern. Exactly 2/3 of the profiles had a birth date listed between June and September, 2014. Only 2 people had a birth date prior to 2014. At first I figured this must have been not really their birth but when they joined Facebook. After all, no babies are going to be Liking my posts about business classes. Looking further, though, virtually all of those suspiciously young Facebook users had made posts on Facebook prior to the date of their birth. So unless the most common thing to do is to join Facebook, using your join date as your date of birth, posting and then editing the posts to backdate them to before you joined to look like you’d been there longer (but not editing the birth date), and doing so in Seattle but saying that you’re in Tonga or Mexico, and then going and Liking business ads, I’m not sure how to explain what I was seeing.

Oh, right. The Results.

Really, none of that matters, right? I mean, from a business perspective, what I wanted was for Seattle(ish) people to see that I had a class coming up and clicking the link to learn more about it and, hopefully, to have them sign up. Maybe if there’s a little bit of donked up data and some hinky behavior it doesn’t really matter as long as my business goals actually get met.

Well, here’s what I paid for with my $20. I got 57 interactions total, for a cost-per-interaction of $0.35. A pretty good cost for online marketing…as long as you don’t look further.

That 57 interactions breaks down as follows:

31 Post Likes (might be tangentially helpful because friends-of-friends could see that behavior, but not directly a business goal result)

1 Page Like (Okay, so that one person has a 5% chance of seeing things I post in the future)

1 Link Click (my preferred outcome)

In typical online advertising, you count cost-per-click (CPC), with the click resulting in the goal behavior, such as going to your website or lead generation page. Of my 57 interactions, only one of those did that. So if we apply typical online advertising terminology and definitions instead of Facebook’s, I had a CPC of $20 per click. Which really is not that great. If I could be sure that person was really interested in business and lived in Seattle, it might still be worth it…but clearly I can’t make that assumption. For all I know, someone in Puerto Rico has now seen the information about my class in Seattle and will not be attending. $20 wasted.

I could have, I suppose, sent out bulk mail fliers. I could be assured, at the very least, that they would go to Seattle area people and that there were real people at the other end. My Facebook ad supposedly reached 3064 people and 57 interacted, or 1.8%. That’s about the typical response percentage that junk mail gets. Only “touched the piece of email” wouldn’t be part of the count, so the junk mail route might be more effective, if more expensive.

The Silver Lining

So what if my ad was shown to infants, a third of which lived in other countries and didn’t speak my language? At least I have “exposure” right? Well, I suppose that assumes none of those profiles are fake, of course. (One has been deleted already.) Okay, so exposure isn’t even a good silver lining…

The silver lining is, then, is that at least I got a blog post out of it.

And maybe your comments. Have you advertised on Facebook and had actual business come out of it? Or have you done so and found similar weird things? Tell me your experiences. (If I seem to harp on Facebook a lot, it’s because I’ve never known someone personally who showed me data-centered evidence of benefit from Facebook. I’ve heard people making the claims without any evidence, and seen second-hand or third-hand data, but nothing that I’d classify as a “primary source.”)

Of course, if you’d like me to do some analysis of your data to see if your Facebook activities have been effective at reaching your goals, I’d be happy to discuss it with you. Just send me a message and we can get started.

Marketing on Tsu (the new social media site) is in some ways a whole new beast for small business owners. In other ways it’s the same. I’ve seen lots of articles on the pros and cons of Tsu as a social media site, its prospects for the future, and so forth, but not really a look at how an entrepreneur might use the site to develop business prospects.

But first, a brief introduction to Tsu for those who haven’t tried it yet.

What is Tsu.co? An Overview as a User

Before you start marketing on Tsu, you should know what Tsu is. The easiest way to conceptualize it is Facebook, only with YouTube’s advertising model. That is, the people who create the best content and get the most views on what they post are the people who have the most to earn. Yes: Tsu pays its users to use the site (which works much like Facebook).

Without going into too much detail, you need to join through an invitation. (Here’s one for you if you haven’t joined yet.) When you do that, you’ll become my “child” (or the child of the person whose invite you used) on the Tsu Family Tree.

That family tree comes into play really only when the ad revenue bit happens. Basically, when people click on ads–and yes, they do–the advertiser pays money to Tsu. The site takes 10% off the top. The rest gets divided among the users in a particular way. The creators of the content (i.e., posts) that were associated with the ad clicks get half of it. The other half gets distributed, mainly to your ancestors up the family tree in quickly diminishing amounts.

While some focus on that last bit as being basically multi-level marketing, note that while having prolific and popular children can bring you in a little money, the single biggest way to increase your earnings is to actually post great content. At least in theory.

Beyond that, it’s pretty much like using Facebook. You can post pictures or links, comment, Like posts or comments, send private messages, mention people with their @username, install their app on your phone, and so forth. One notable difference is that it’s much easier to become someone’s Friend (mutual connection) or Follower (one-way, like Twitter or Google Plus). Other differences include the Bank, where you can see how much ad revenue you’ve earned in your social media activity, and Analytics, where you can get more information about how many views, Likes, and comments there have been on the posts of the last 30 days so you can learn what your audience wants more of.

Finally, you can write your posts on Tsu and, if you’ve connected your Facebook or Twitter accounts, send that same post to those social sites directly.

Marketing on Tsu: Being an Advertiser

I can’t tell you much about this because currently there’s no interface for becoming an advertiser. You simply have to email them and set something up. That’s kind of a bummer because it would be great to be able to do some poking around before getting one of their sales people involved.

There are three ways you can spend your advertising budget at Tsu:

Pushing content one layer out through your network. For those familiar with the Google+ “Extended Circles,” this is similar. It gets your post seen not only by your friends and followers, but also by their friends and followers.

Targeting an audience. This is a more traditional advertising approach. You tell them the demographics you want to reach (whether they’re connected to you or not) and they try to get your post seen by those kinds of people. They specify geography, age, and gender as demographic groups you can target. Given the simplicity of the profile section, they might be the only demographics possible for targeting.

Display ads. This is the oldest and most established form of Internet marketing. You pick the demographics, you make an ad image, and they show it.

It’s all pretty straightforward, but I haven’t been privy to any data in terms of effectiveness or pricing. I’ve sent a message to the Tsu folks so if you’re seeing this sentence, I haven’t heard back yet.

Marketing on Tsu: Generating Traffic & Leads

Something that really stuck out to me about Tsu this last month was the traffic. After doing some slight massaging of the data to make it a little simpler, the top traffic sources for my website look like this over my first 30 days on Tsu:

Direct (41%)

Email (18%)

Google+ (15%)

Organic Search (9%)

Tsu (6%)

Facebook (5%)

LinkedIn (2%)

Other traffic sources (2% or less, each)

I’ve been on Google+ and Facebook (and Twitter, which didn’t send me any traffic at all in this time period) basically since the beginning of July when my business launched. That’s over 120 days. I’ve been on Tsu for 1/4 of that time and it’s already sending me more traffic than Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, and about half as much as Google+. Now, that could just be my own pattern, or the fact that there are more avidly-interacting early adopters on Tsu than on other platforms, or simply a small sample size. But it at least suggests there may be some marketing power in terms of traffic generation. And if you’re curious, the other new social site, Ello, sent me no traffic either…though I’ve been less active there than on Tsu.

I should also point out that my Tsu account is not particularly branded as business. It’s mostly set up as a personal account, but does talk about what I do in my business as has a link to my business website. I’m assuming the impact would have been greater had I really focused on the branding/marketing aspect of the account.

Some Notes on Tsu and Google Analytics

I also wanted to quickly note something for those who are running to their Google Analytics to check their own Tsu stats. Google Analytics doesn’t quite treat Tsu uniformly throughout. My Tsu visits show up as “tsu / social” when I’m looking at the All Traffic section in Acquisition. But in the Social section of Acquisition, Tsu isn’t shown at all. So although All Traffic shows Tsu is recognized as a social network, its numbers aren’t included in social-specific sections.

Like I said, some of this may be because of small sample size or my own business’ patterns. If you’re on Tsu and using Analytics, I’d love to hear if your patterns confirm what I’m seeing, or contrast in some way. Let me know in the comments (or on Tsu!)

Sometimes, spending as much time as I do on social media isn’t fun. Sure, I get to watch people look envious when I say I can go on Facebook whenever I want because I work for myself. But really, things all start looking the same after a while. “Really? Another baby?” “Oh, look! Another kitten!” “Oh, how about that…another picture of someone’s lunch.”

Every so often, though, something comes up which breaks the mold and it’s very refreshing.

Whoever was posting for the Washington State Department of Transportation’s Seattle area account was on top of it the other day. They put together a tweet—about traffic, no less—that got me (who has never had a driver’s license in my life and who can only tell cars apart by color, not by make/model) forwarding a tweet about road conditions.

Here’s the Tweet

Why is this such a great tweet? It’s got it all. It’s informative, telling about a real, on-the-ground (or on-the-trestle in this case) situation that drivers should be aware of. It handles a problematic situation (can’t verify via camera) in a humorous way. And chickens—because everyone knows the Internet runs on cute animal pictures. By which, I really mean that it’s entertaining.

By the way, if you want to see the original tweet, you can find it here. At time of posting, it had been retweeted 48 times and favorited by 65 people. Not bad for a traffic update, eh?

Before you get the wrong impression about my social media engagement experience, I’ve been using social media for more than two months. My first personal status update on Facebook was on 26 October 2006. My first tweet was on 18 April 2008. And I got an early invitation to Google+, so I was on it before the public release: 30 June 2011 (the public launch was in September). We won’t talk about MySpace, but I was on that for a bit before Facebook came along.

In contrast, Ardea Coaching as a brand page has only two months of data on these “big three” social sites. That gives me some insight into what new businesses confront when they’re just getting started.

Caveat: Is Social Media Engagement Right For You?

A frequent refrain when I’m training someone on social media marketing is that success depends on what you’re looking to achieve. “What’s your goal?” I often ask. This blog post will assume that audience interaction assists those goals. (Maybe your business goals focus on funneling people from social media sites to visit your website for more information. Perhaps you don’t care if they interact with you. Or maybe you’ve found that those who interact don’t visit your site. In that case, recognize that what I say here may not apply to you.)

From my perspective, interaction is good. For Ardea, I look at it this way: for every interaction, even if it’s a simple +1 on Google Plus or a Like on a Facebook post, there’s a person who is indicating they’re more interested in what I do than all the (let’s face it) millions of people who didn’t take the time to click that button. They’re that much closer to referring business to me, or signing up for a class, or writing a recommendation, or asking for a proposal. Therefore, I find interaction one way to pre-qualify leads.

Note that although I did start my G+ and Twitter accounts earlier than FB, I gathered data starting July 7th, my first official day of relaunching Ardea. As mentioned in a social media post recently (Google+, Facebook, Twitter), my follower growth has been fastest on G+ by a fairly wide margin.

Endorsements

An endorsement is the term I’m using for the lowest-commitment social media engagement on the big three sites: a Like on Facebook, a favorite (the star) on Twitter, or a +1 on Google Plus. It’s an interaction, so it shows interest, but not much more. I compared the total of all endorsements, as well as endorsements-per-post to see where I got the most interaction; there wasn’t too much difference by percentage. The chart below shows percentages by total endorsements. By per-post, Facebook gained about 8 percentage points and the other two showed roughly proportional decreases, so the chart looked similar enough I didn’t include it here.

Comments & Mentions

This is the next level up, in my opinion. If someone comments on a post, or mentions you in one of theirs (or in another comment, or whatever), we’re talking about that portion of your audience who has risen above the single, easy, one-button click to actually typing things like words or even sentences. Sure, occasionally it’s not more than “LOL” but usually there’s more thought, time, and effort expended on the part of the audience member. Like with engagements, I looked at totals and per-post averages. On a percent basis the two were even closer (Facebook gained only 4% share), so again only one chart. Note that Twitter might be so big because of a disproportionately long conversation with Danny Wong sparked by my earlier blog post riffing off one of his articles. His comments were about a third of all the Twitter mentions. And because only Legolas’ elf eyes would be able to discern the difference in the chart, Google Plus is at 48.3% and Twitter is second at 46.7%.

You should note something else here, too. Above, I linked to my social media posts about follower growth. The people who commented on that post in G+ were industry leaders. I’d consider Danny Wong to be an influencer or “big name” (big enough that I’m happy to have received so many mentions by him on Twitter). In comparison, 100% of the comments on Facebook were made by myself (replies, follow-up information, etc.) or by people that I already know in my day-to-day life. In other words, from a quality standpoint, Twitter and Google Plus are delivering interaction and connection with new and influential people. They are delivering high volume. In comparison, Facebook is low volume connection with people I already know. That’s not to say the Facebook comments aren’t from quality people, rather, that I can connect with all those people without ever using Facebook.

Shares

Here’s the gold medal level of interaction. A share is love. A share is required for “going viral.” A share is, to use Seth Godin’s terms, a “sneeze” that passes on the “ideavirus.” It’s what exposes new people to your brand, your services, your marketing messages. It’s an advertisement, a recommendation, and an endorsement all wrapped into one. The note here is mainly that I specifically asked people on Facebook to share, whereas I didn’t on either G+ or Twitter. I was trying to get a minimum number of followers on Facebook so that they would give me stats about my page (a requirement the other two sites don’t have and, even if the rule applied to all three, wouldn’t have been a problem). Again, there wasn’t much shift between totals and shares-per-post; the difference is more or less the same as I described in “Endorsements,” above.

Conclusions

Based on my own pages’ data, it’s pretty clear that from both a quality and a quantity standpoint, Google+ is the big winner. It takes the top spot in all three areas in both total numbers and per-post averages. Twitter still provided me with better visibility by and connection to new people than Facebook, even though it came in last in two of the areas. Facebook only really supplied me with connections to people I already know, and only after I made the ask of my contacts.

If this seems like I’m bashing Facebook, I’m not. If I wanted to concentrate my marketing on my friends and family, it would have come out on top (remember, “what’s your goal?”). There are, however, many people who think being on Facebook with their business is the best thing they can do online. My intent is to show those people that they should probably explore more sites as part of their online marketing strategy. It’s particularly true if interaction with new and influential people is important to them. Finally, the Twitter comments example shows that sometimes the needle moves in a big way because of some chance, serendipitous conversation.

Have you seen measurable success on Facebook relative to other sites? Or are you seeing the same trend I am? I’d love to hear your stories in the comments below, or on one of these social media sites!

Since Facebook went public, they’ve been trying to make a transition. They started as a site with its core centered firmly in a free service that replicates electronically the connections we have in “real life.” They now need to be a site centered in what the shareholders want: money. One of the primary ways they’ve done that is with what I’ll call “Facebook ads”—but is broader than just ads. It’s the various ways a business (or individual, but let’s stick to business) can promote itself. This includes paying to “Boost Post” or paying to “Promote Page” in addition to using the Facebook Ads Campaign Manager or posting Offers.

However you want to do it, you’ve chosen to drop some money in Facebook’s pocket for some extra exposure to new (or existing) people. You go through the steps to let them know the audience you’d like to reach. You send them the cash, and they promote you to the right people.

Or, at least that’s how it’s supposed to work. But there’s one problem with Facebook ads: they’re not that smart.

A Personal Example: The Facebook Ads Shown To Me

Here’s a screenshot of some ads I saw last week:

Facebook ads I saw last week

Seems like they’re targeting pretty well. I’ve been talking about having started a business recently, so the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) site Insightly.com is a good bet. I’m also a big fan of fountain pens, so the Pilot pen is a pretty good match for me. Not only that, but Facebook has shown me those ads not just based on a guess, but based on web data collected behind the scenes. These are exquisitely tailored to me in particular because I’d been talking about both in private messages on Facebook. Yes, and not just a Pilot fountain pen, but the Pilot Metal Falcon, Extra Fine Nib, with a black barrel.

The Problem

What’s the problem? I was talking about both of those things because I already have them. I talked about Insightly.com because I was asking another business owner what CRM system he used and whether he’d tried Insightly or not. I always want to be aware of alternatives so I can change if it makes sense to do so. And I was talking about the Pilot Metal Falcon because I was telling a friend I’d just bought it and loved how it felt while writing. (Here’s a German word for you: Schreibvergnügen — writing pleasure.)

Gratuitous pen shot. The soft nib allows variation in line thickness based on pressure.

Still–why does it matter? Think of it from Insightly’s or Amazon’s point of view. They paid to have their ads seen by relevant people. Although Facebook did a pretty good job at picking what to show me based on what it knows about me, it was too late on both guesses by a couple of weeks. It wasn’t smart enough to understand the context in which I was talking about those products. It couldn’t draw the conclusion, “Michael already has those things. Although he’s talking about them, it’s not because he’s a potential buyer.”

In other words, I’m a false positive for an ad match.

If you choose to use Facebook ads, then, you need to be aware that some portion of your money will go to advertising to people who have precisely zero chance of buying because they just got—and may be highly pleased with—your product or an alternative to it. (I bought my pen, by the way, from The Lost Quill a small, local, woman-owned business in Bainbridge, WA, just a short scenic ferry ride and walk from downtown Seattle. Annabella made me try different pens and inks until I was sure the Metal Falcon elicited the most Schreibvergnügen.)

The Solution

I’m all about solutions, not just complaining about Facebook and showing off my lovely pen. Here’s what you can do to avoid wasting money: measure your return on investment (ROI). Set up your ads so that you can tell which ad or campaign it came from–for example, give it a unique name, or if you’re using Google Analytics, be sure to use UTM tagging on your link. That way you have a chance at seeing how many people came to your site because of the ad. Depending on your tracking options and the goals for the ad, you should be able to determine how many of that set of visitors ended up converting. (A conversion could be buying, creating an account, downloading, subscribing, watching a video, or whatever action you are looking for). Then you can see whether the cost of getting that conversion was worth what you paid for it.

And here’s the best part: whether it was worth it or not, it doesn’t matter how many of the people who saw it were false positives. If Insightly got enough paying members because of that ad that it was profitable to do so, it doesn’t matter if there were 10,000 false positives in addition to me. The end result is the same: profit. On the other hand, if Amazon finds that they didn’t sell enough pens with their campaign, it doesn’t matter if I was the only false positive out of 10,000 people. It still wasn’t worth it.

The moral of the story, then, is twofold: First, you should know that Facebook ads sometimes (often?) are shown to inappropriate targets. Second, if you set up your ad campaign and web tracking correctly, the first item can be safely ignored.

If you have specific questions related to this, please feel free to contact me and I’ll do my best to answer them.